


We Shall Be Monsters, Cut Off From All The World

by ErikaWilliams



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Fallout AU, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Nuclear War, Raider Aranea, Synth Prompto, Vault-Dweller Gladio, Vault-Dweller Noctis, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2019-09-01 14:17:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16766803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErikaWilliams/pseuds/ErikaWilliams
Summary: Life in the vault is safe, familiar.  Until the supplies start to run low, and the few survivors are forced to the surface, where danger lurks around every corner.  Only a few know how to survive in the wasteland, and not all of them are what they seem.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be for Nano, but it looks unlikely that I'll get to 50,000 words by the deadline. So I posted the first chapter to help keep me motivated to push through the rest.

Noct tried to ignore the people milling around him and focused on the lunch tray in front of him. There were about a hundred people scheduled for lunch that hour, but none of them wanted to sit with him. One of the downsides to being the Overseer’s son he supposed. Plus, the one person who might have sat with him was scheduled for a different lunch, so he couldn’t expect any reprieve from that front. Everyone else sort of blended together, all wearing identical blue and yellow body suits with their unifying number stamped across the back. They were clustered together in little groups, their voices joining together into a steady drone that was far too easy to tune out.

He poked at the brown ration bar on his plate with the end tine of his fork. He didn’t want to know how the ration bars were made or what exactly went into them. Probably a bunch of vegetables or some sort of synthetic greenery. He couldn’t remember the last time they had been served a proper meal, so he couldn’t even begin to fathom when he could look forward to the next one.

Gladio would have known. Gladio was good at remembering things like that. Probably because Gladio always saved part of his portions for Iris. But Gladio wasn’t around, so he couldn’t ask him when they were likely to get a decent meal again. He could always go to the Overseer’s office during his free hours and ask his dad. His dad had never wanted him to think he should get special treatment just because of his birth, so he probably would not have told him. The only person who likely knew was the woman who was in charge of rations, but she a prickly sort who always wrinkled her nose when she saw him. One time, when he had been much younger, he had made a complaint about the taste of the ration bars. She had cut his portion down to a quarter of what it had been for over two weeks until his dad had eventually intervened. But she had never forgotten about it, and he didn’t want to risk her wrath again.

And he was going to starve until dinner unless he managed to scarf down his ration bar now. There was no use putting it off any longer, and no Gladio to give him something from his secret stash. He found the best way to do it was to just plow through the damn thing. The bar was so dry it made his eyes water as he choked it down. He kept eying up his water ration with every bite, but he resisted the urge to grab it. He imagined it was what cardboard tasted like. What if that was one of the main ingredients? Cardboard and carrots. He choked the last bite down past the lump in his throat and lunged at his water. He downed the whole cup in three large gulps but it didn’t help with the dryness that threatened to take his breath away. Those things should have been outlawed.

“Noctis?” someone said quietly from beside him. “I need to talk to you about something.”

He didn’t interact with him much, but he recognized Talcott from his visits to the classroom and some of the few times he had been over to Gladio’s family’s quarters. Talcott wasn’t scheduled for lunch for another two hours, and he didn’t know why the kid would torture himself by staring at those bricks that heathen tried to pass off as food. The kids deserved better than that, and maybe some day he could give it to them.

“What-” he started, but coughed from a crumb stuck in his throat. “What’s up, Talcott?”

“It’s about Iris,” Talcott said so earnestly that his heart instantly dropped. Gladio would never forgive him if something happened to Iris on his watch. How much trouble could she have gotten into on her own?

“She hasn’t been in any of her classes since yesterday and I didn’t see her at breakfast this morning.”

It wasn’t like Iris to skip either of those things, especially since she had to know her absence would be reported to her father.

“Don’t worry, Talcott, we’ll find her,” he said with a reassurance he didn’t feel. There was only so much trouble she could get into, and none of it would end well for her. If she wasn’t dead already, her dad would kill her when he found out she had been skipping classes, and if she was dead, Gladio would kill him for not keeping a closer eye on her. Someone might have taken her. She might have found her way into the tunnels and decided to explore them on her own. “Can you think of any place she might have gone?” Obviously she wasn’t in her room, or Talcott wouldn’t have asked him for help.

“I checked all her usual spots,” he said solemnly. He had probably skipped a few classes of his own to look for her. “Can’t you go in your dad’s office and check the cameras?” he asked hopefully.

So that was the reason Talcott had come to him for help. “I’d rather not get him involved,” he said as he pictured himself standing in his dad’s office, begging him for a chance to look at the security cameras. Besides, he knew there were plenty of places where the cameras did not reach, and he was willing to bet that Iris knew about them too. “Besides, if we get the Overseer involved, Iris will definitely get into trouble.”

“Right,” Talcott said with a nod. “You’ll find her though, won’t you, Noctis?”

“Of course I will.” He didn’t see how he had any other choice in the matter. Besides, it would be good practice for when he was Overseer of his own Vault. “Why don’t you go back to their quarters and wait for her to come home?” he suggested, patting the boy on the shoulder. Talcott nodded and headed out of the cafeteria.

He didn’t have anywhere to be for another forty-five minutes anyway, and no one to talk to in the cafeteria. He took his tray over to the proper receptacle and stepped away from the noise of the cafeteria. The problem with finding someone when everyone wore the exact same outfit was she could be right under his nose the entire time and he would ever know it. Still, he didn’t doubt Talcott when he said Iris was missing, because there was no one else around to keep track of her, and he would take his job very seriously. Besides, it just sounded like something she would do.

The first place he looked for her was in a back storage room no one ever went into. The crates he and Gladio had placed in front of the crevice in the wall had not been touched since the last time he and Gladio had been down there. At least he didn’t have to worry about her crawling around in the tunnels. He and Gladio had run into a couple Radroaches the last time they had been down there, and he didn’t think she would be able to handle them on her own. They hadn’t completely mapped them out yet either, and she very well may have been lost down there forever. And he likely would have been joining her in his efforts to find her. Definitely a good thing that she wasn’t down there and probably didn’t even know anything about them. He and Gladio should really consider telling someone about that before something really did happen to someone. For now it was enough for him to know that she wasn’t.

The next place he checked for her was in a room he and Gladio had discovered one day by accident. There was equipment that seemed to serve no purpose and no one seemed to know the room was even there. Best of all, there was no camera installed in the room, like they abandoned it halfway through construction. It was a good place to go do things you wanted to do in secret. He and Gladio had shared their first drink back there. Gladio had bribed one of the security team to give it to them. It was awful, and they had both been sick the next day (Gladio suspected the guard had laced it with something else). The room had remained a good spot through, for when either one of them just wanted to disappear for a little while. He had no doubt that Gladio had told Iris about the room, but she wasn’t there either.

He leaned back against the closed door and sighed. Finding Iris was a much harder task than he initially anticipated. Maybe the problem was he was thinking too much of where he and Gladio would be. Maybe he needed to think instead about where Iris would be. She wasn’t where she was supposed to be, safe at home waiting for her brother and father to return. Why would she? Every where she turned she would just be reminded of their absence and wonder if they were okay, if they would be returning to her alive. He knew exactly where she would be, and he marched down the hall, confidant he could get her back home.

He had only been at the door once before, when his father had taken him up to see it when he was about twelve. The door to the outside, that had protected them and the other dwellers for generations and that would continue to stand long after they were gone. Technically, only members of security were allowed to come to the door. It was easier for the general population to forget that there was a bigger world out there. At least down in the vault, they were safe. Everything was provided for them, even if the food was the absolute worst. At least it was non radiated food, and they didn’t have to fight somebody else for it.

“Noctis,” Cor called to him from where he sat at the main security desk, the computer that operated the door in front of him. It really was a marvel, that huge circular door over twenty feet in diameter, controlled by that tiny computer. And only Cor and his father knew the password. “You know you’re not supposed to be up here.”

“I was looking for Iris.” He thought for sure she would have been up here, the one place she could be closer to her father and brother while they were gone. She couldn’t leave the vault, she had to have special permission for that, but this was as close as she was going to be able to get to them.

“Iris isn’t allowed up here either,” Cor informed him but he made no effort to leave behind his desk or make him leave. He also didn’t put in a call to have someone else from security to come escort him back down into general. Maybe being the Overseer’s only son did have it’s advantages.

“But she is here, isn’t she?” he asked because if she was not up there he didn’t know where else to begin to look for her. This was the last place she could possible be. Unless she somehow managed to get out of the vault.

“She’s on top of the door,” Cor told him, unconcerned with the fact that she could fall off at any moment. She might slip off the top of the cog and break a leg... or worse. So he supposed it was up to him if he was going to save her from herself.

Whoever had build the vault had left some scaffolding to the left of the door in case it would ever need repairs. He made his way to the bottom of the metal and looked up towards the top. There was no one around anymore who would know how to make repairs to the door, but the scaffolding remained as a reminder of those who had come before. Whoever had made the vault had prepared well for the future, except for passing the knowledge that went into building it onto the next generations. He put his hand on the metal rod of the scaffolding and gave it a light shove. It didn’t wobble, although a few loose stones came down from the stone wall. He supposed it was sturdy enough, and if Iris had just managed to climb it, he should be able to make it up there without a problem. Should. Living underground didn’t give him a lot of practice in the climbing department, and by the time he had successfully pulled himself up to the first platform, his arms were shaking and he was starting to realize exactly what he had gotten himself into. But Gladio trusted him to keep an eye on Iris when he wasn’t around, and he couldn’t exactly do that when Iris was at the top of the vault door, and he was still stuck down on the ground. So, he took a deep breath and hauled himself up to the next platform. Man, that was a long way up, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit that Iris could do something that he couldn’t. So he forced his shaking arms to pull himself to the next level and the next one until he finally reached the top level with the top of the door. 

Iris was up there, sitting between two teeth of the cog, her back pressed up against the earth and her knees pulled close to her chest. “Hey, Iris,” he said quietly, making his way carefully out onto the top of the door. He didn’t want to startle her into falling off, and he definitely didn’t want to fall off himself. He crawled out on his hands and knees, then had to maneuver carefully over the closest tooth to him. How had she possibly pulled this off without falling to her death? He stopped on the other side of the tooth closest to her, peering over the cold metal at her. “What are you doing up here?”

“Waiting for Gladdy and my dad to come back,” she said without looking over at him. She might be up there for a long time, because no one knew when they would be coming back.

“That could be weeks,” he pointed out to her. He didn’t even know where they had gone.

“I have ration bars,” she said, moving slightly so he could see the satchel on the other side of her. Looked like Gladio wasn’t the only one in the family with secret stores of food, but he preferred the type of food that Gladio liked to stock up on. She also had a blanket up there and what looked like an old book. She seemed intent on staying up there for as long as she possible could, so he needed to try a new tactic.

“Your father and Gladio won’t be too happy if they find out you’ve been up here,” he tried to convince her. If he couldn’t get her to come down, he might just have to leave her to her fate. She might get bored long before her family came home.

“Cor hasn’t ratted me out yet,” she said with a pointed look in the direction of the head of security. Obviously, this was not the first time she had been up there, and he didn’t know how he had missed her disappearances before now. Maybe she hadn’t come up here for quite as long. “Are you going to tell on me?” she asked looking directly at him. Not if he could get her down from there before they came back.

“Why do you want to be up here anyway?” he asked, changing tactics again and pressing his back up against the solid ground. Don’t look down, don’t look down.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, lowering her chin to the top of her knees. “You and Gladdy get to leave some day.”

Some day a long time from now. He hadn’t even heard from Lunafreya in several months, and his dad had made no mention of setting a date for the wedding. Until then, he was going to have to live in this vault. But maybe he understood where Iris was coming from. It was hard to find yourself in a place that dictated your destiny for you. More than that, once Gladio was gone, it was just going to be her and their dad, and he wasn’t going to be around forever.

“That’s not going to be for a long time,” he reassured her. Plus, she would probably still have Talcott. “Gladio and I are both going to be around for a good long while.”

“Where’s Gladdy now?” she asked him with a raised eyebrow. Certainly not there, or else they wouldn’t be on top of the door having this conversation.

“Out there,” he said, tilting his head to the ground behind him and whatever might have been on the other side. He had never been out there himself. It would be Gladio’s job to protect him from whatever was outside there when the time came. All he would have to do was walk himself from point a to point b. “But he’ll be back, you know that.”

“I know. It’s just he never tells me anything about what’s out there.”

Gladio never told him anything about the outside either. He had tried to ask him once, perhaps not quite as insistently as Iris would, but he had asked. Gladio was not forthcoming with details, and had gotten awfully quiet. He had decided not to ask him further about it if he was going to upset Gladio with his questions. Something out there disturbed him, something that he didn’t want to think about.

“There’s nothing out there.”

“If there’s nothing out there, then why aren’t I allowed out there?”

She had a point and one he really couldn’t argue against. If there really was nothing out there, why did they have to stay down there in the vault? And why did he need an armed guard when it was going to be his turn to leave the vault. Sure, the surface had Radroaches, but they had Radroaches break into the vault on occasion. Was there something on the surface that was worse than Radroaches?

“You should still get down from here. What happens if they come back and Cor needs to open the door?”

“He’ll give me enough warning to get down,” she asserted.

“But what if they need to get in in a hurry and he doesn’t have time to warn you?”

“Fine,” she said with a scowl, reaching behind her to grab her pack of rations. “I should go work on my strength training anyway.” She stood up with a surprising ease and slung the satchel over her shoulder. He reached forward to balance her, but she didn’t need his help. “Does it smell strange up here to you?”

“It’s the smell of unfiltered air,” he told her. The tunnels had the same danky, earthy smell to them, but it was so different from the smell inside the vault.

“I guess,” she said as she stepped around him and pounced lightly on the to the scaffolding. He crawled back after her, hoping Gladio would return soon before Iris was the death of him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompto wakes up on the side of the road, with no memory of who is or where he came from.

Everything was black and smelled like arid dust. Various parts of his body ached which was really the only real sign he had that he was still alive. He groaned and tried to move his head but only succeeded in sending a shooting pain down the back of his neck. There was a sticky spot on his right temple, and his left arm was trapped beneath his body. He needed to get moving. He didn’t know where he was, but if there was blood on his forehead, it couldn’t be safe. He groaned and his own voice sounded foreign to his ears. He just needed to get to his feet and move. His arm was numb where it was pinned underneath him. He flexed his feet. They were still working, even though the shoes on his feet felt rather tight. Just one little movement at a time.

He cracked his eyes open, squinting against the bright glare of the sun. Damn, was it bright out, and it sent a fresh wave of pain through his head. When he breathed out, a little cloud of dust spiraled up from the ground. He couldn’t hear anything except the thrumming of his heart and his harsh breathing. That didn’t mean he was alone out there, so he really needed to move. He pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the various aches and pains in his joints. He straightened himself up and brushed the dust off his dark pants. It looked like he was on the side of a cracked road, shimmering from the heat of the sun. A road meant there might be other people nearby.

He looked up the road and back the other way over his shoulder. He didn’t know which way he had come from and which way he had been going. For that matter, who the hell was he? How did he get here? Where the hell was this? There was nothing except the road and the empty sky. Not even a cloud to protect him from the heat. He glanced down at his hands. There was a mark on the back of his wrist, a series of lines and numbers. He rubbed at it with the other hand, but the mark appeared to be permanent. He patted down his clothes, looking for anything else he might have to give him an idea of who he was or where he was supposed to be going.

His fingers found a piece of paper in his back pocket and he pulled it out. It looked like it was supposed to be a note, but the writing was smudged. The only thing legible was the very top line with the word “Prompto.” It seemed familiar, like it was something he had heard many times before. Maybe it was his name. It seemed as good as anything else he had at the moment.

He needed to get moving, or else a name wasn’t going to do him much good. He needed to get his wounds treated and get some water in him before the sun completely dried him out. And he needed to figure out where he was supposed to be going and who he was.

He looked up and down the road a couple of times, debating about which way he should be going. If he stayed on the road, sooner or later he would come across something living, for better or worse. If he stayed where he was, he risked dying before anyone found him. Why would people use this road when it was so cracked and would be difficult to walk on? At least not the type of people who would be willing to help him. He looked back in the direction his head was facing when he had regained consciousness. It was reasonable to assume that he had been headed in that direction when he had fallen over. Or when he had been knocked out as the case seemed likely to be. Whoever had done the deed had taken everything from him except the clothes on his back. The bastards had even run off with his name and purpose. He had to have a reason. He couldn’t see why anyone would want to willingly come out into this wasteland.

He couldn’t see anything in the direction he had been heading though. Just dirt and dead trees for as far as the eye could see. Nothing about that struck him as particularly interesting as to why he should go that way. Of course, he didn’t see anything anywhere else either. Maybe he really was just an idiot who had decided to come out to this wasteland for no good reason. Maybe he had been somewhere in civilization and someone had dared him to come out there with nothing to defend himself with. He doubted that had been the smartest idea in his life, however old he might have been.

He turned back around in the direction he had come from. Maybe he would just march back there and find the person who had instigated the whole mess and give them a piece of his mind. It was for the greater good. They couldn’t just be sending unarmed people out into this world and expect them to come back in one piece. They needed to be made aware of the consequences of their actions. Besides, if he managed to make his way home, someone would be sure to recognize him, and they could help him put the missing pieces of his life back together.

He took one step forward when a streak of green lightning split the distant sky. Maybe he shouldn’t be going that way. He turned on his heel and started back in the other direction as fast as his aching legs could carry him. He needed to find his way to shelter before that storm reached him. He wasn’t exactly sure what that storm would do to him, but he knew it wouldn’t be anything good. How much shelter would he need to protect himself from a storm like that? He didn’t smell any rain, but something about that storm seemed wrong. Like if he didn’t find shelter before that storm reached him, it would be the last thing he ever did.

He saw a long low building off the road, and he quickened his step. As he got closer, he saw that there were gaping holes in the walls all decorated with the same dude in a blue suit. He didn’t have time to investigate further. The storm was getting closer, and this place would offer him little shelter from the storm. The building might have even collapsed on him if he tried to hunker down there until the storm blew over. He needed to keep moving. He needed to find somewhere with walls and a roof, hopefully made out of something stronger than whatever that building had been made of.

He had to be mindful of the road he walked along. He was having a hard enough time with the cut on his temple and the various other injuries on his body, he didn’t need to add a broken ankle to the equation. The road was cracked like a broken eggshell, and some of the those cracks were as wide as the length of his foot. Plus, the pavement swelled and dipped unnaturally. What had happened here? Did it have anything to do with the storm with the green lightning?

He limped past a metal skeleton of something he didn’t recognize, just sitting on the road, sinking a little into the concrete. What sort of people lived out here that had such bizarre things? He hurried past it, looking at it made his head hurt more than it already did. There had to be other people around here somewhere. For instance, there was whoever had left him unconscious along the side of the road and took off with his identity. And if there were bad people left, there had to be some good people left as well. There just had to be. Unless, he was the good person and they were the only two people left in the world. No, there had to be more people left. The person who had written the note he had found in his pocket for instance. Unless he had written the note himself.

Something large leaped out into the road in front of him, and he stumbled backwards. He tripped on a crack in the road and fell to his butt, just adding more pain to the list. He froze as he stared at the beast in front of him that stared back at him with large eyes so wide he could see the bloodshot whites. Well, one head stared back at him. The other one was staring back the way they had come from, breath misting on the air as its ears swiveled. The beast only had four legs that ended in cloven hooves. He couldn’t get over the two heads though. Two large heads each with a magnificent set of antlers. How did they keep the antlers from getting tangled? He suddenly realized the beast could gore him with very little effort, and he tried to make himself as small as possible on the road. Only one of the heads was paying him any mind, the other one was too busy searching behind it for whatever they had been running from in the first place. Without further incident, the beast leaped from the road and bounced off through the dead forest.

He didn’t think he should stick around to see whatever it was the creature had been running from. It was likely something he would be smart to be terrified of as well. He tried to push himself to his feet, but his head spun and sent him back down to the ground. His head injury must have been worse than he thought it had been. He couldn’t stay there. Staying there would mean certain death from whatever had spooked the beast, or the storm. Or maybe they would both reach him at the same time, and his death would be mercifully quick.

No, he couldn’t die here. He had something important he had to do. He just had to. He wouldn’t have stepped foot into the hell hole otherwise. He forced himself back to his feet, swallowing back down the bile that threatened to come up. The throbbing in his head was getting worse, and making it much more difficult for him to keep moving. Especially when he couldn’t remember why it was so important for him to stay alive. He stood up and took one lurching step forward. That was all he needed to do. Take one step after another. Eventually he would either come across safety, or the storm would overcome him and it wouldn’t matter anymore.

His legs burned, his arms felt like lead and his head felt like it had been thrown in a blender about twenty times in a row. He started looking for a stump or a rock or something that he could sit down on for just a few minutes. When he couldn’t find either of those, the ground was starting to look mighty tempting. The hair on his arms was starting to stand up and dance from the encroaching storm. Maybe he should just go down to the cold welcoming ground and give up. He didn’t even know who he was or where he was supposed to be going. What made him think he could possibly outrun a storm, especially one that seemed hell bent on destroying everything in its path.

Like a mirage in a desert, a stone wall rose from the ground just off the side of the road. It couldn’t possible be real, since stone walls would have had to have been built by humans and it looked like no humans had been here for quite a long time. He moved ever closer, and the wall didn’t disappear, but actually appeared to solidify. He thought he saw movement at the corner of the wall. Just a flash that may very well have been a trick of the lightning, but it swelled something inside of him that felt vaguely like hope.

He pushed past the pain and quickened his pace, nearly stumbling over a root that had snaked its way across the road. He couldn’t afford to fall now, not when he was so close to salvation. He forced himself to run the last fifty yards and collapsed against the close door on the side of the road. He couldn’t have come this far to be defeated by a few planks of wood. He used the rest of his energy to slam his fist weakly against the wood once. The wood was thick, and the only noise he made was a small thud that only would have been heard if someone was just inside the door. He sank down, defeated, against the door. How could he have come so far to be defeated by a door? It didn’t seem fair, since he couldn’t even remember who he was. How could he possible expect anyone else to remember him after he was gone? The storm was getting closer, he could feel it in his veins now. This was the end.

The door opened behind him and he toppled backwards into the settlement. He didn’t even see who it was helping him when someone grabbed him by the arms and started pulling him to safety.


	3. Chapter 3

They were a long way from the vault, the farthest Gladio had ever been. He wasn’t sure that his father had ever even been this far out. He asked why they had gone so far when he had been trained that the further away he got, the less likely it was he would return to the vault alive. His father hadn’t had an answer for him, so he supposed it was one of those things he was going to have to answer for himself. It was one of his father’s favorite teaching tactics, let him figure it out on his own. Still, he worried about Iris. They weren’t allowed to tell her where they were going, and they were going to be gone for much longer than they normally were. She might get worried about them, and then she might do something stupid. He would just have to trust that Noct would be able to stop her from doing something that would get herself killed.

A crackling noise at his wrist distracted him from his thoughts of Iris and back to his current situation. He had been headed towards a puddle of water when the device had started crackling so he took a few steps back until it stopped. That could have been dangerous.

“Get your head out of your ass,” his dad told him from where he had already been taking the high ground around the puddle. “I taught you better than to approach standing water.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled as he looked around for a place to scramble up the slope to join his father. His dad’s Pipboy had been quiet the whole time; he suspected he probably didn’t even need it anymore because he already knew all of the tricks. “I was just thinking about Iris.”

“That’s your problem,” his dad told him. “You think too much when the only thing you should be worried about is what’s going on around you now.”

“I don’t even know where we are,” he said as he reached the top of the slope. From his new vantage point, he could see the green sheen to the water. His Pipboy was quiet on his wrist as they made the detour around the puddle.

“Your Pipboy knows the way home,” his dad told him. He hoped that wasn’t going to be the next lesson. Take him far away from the vault and tell him he had to find his own way home. “You’ll be able to see the city from the next rise.” He didn’t particularly care for an empty city from before the war, especially since he didn’t know where any of them were in relation to home. He would much rather be home than climbing up this stupid mountain any day but he couldn’t tell his dad that. As a member of the security team, he would be expected to make trips to the surface. And since he would be escorting Noct to his next vault, he needed all the experience he could get on the surface. Just like his dad had had when he had escorted the Overseer to their current vault.

They finally reached the top of the mount, and his father stopped for a moment so they could both catch their breath. The city in question lay below them, covered in a dense fog, flickering with green energy. The rivers on either side of the city were filled with slow moving sludge. A few bridges leading into the city were little more than the beams that had once supported tons of steel and concrete. Obviously, this city had taken a direct hit during The Great War. They wouldn’t be going down there anyway. Too dangerous, unless his dad had some secret power armor sitting around for them. Power armor was too rare, and it wouldn’t be worth the effort to protect it. They would have to forget about the city for now. After they had a moment to catch their breath, his father started down the other side of the mount, heading west. He spared one last look at the city behind them.

The sun was going down by the time his dad allowed them to stop again. They had just reached the top of another hill, and he was staring to wonder why his dad had decided to take them to a place where there were so many hills when something dangerous could be lurking behind every rise. This place didn’t seem much better with a bunch of large empty buildings overlooking the cracked highway below. Their Pipboys were silent, and he didn’t hear anything else rustling around. That didn’t mean there weren’t any feral ghouls around though. Sometimes they liked to stay quiet until fresh blooded humans were right on top of them.

His dad led the way across the plaza, moving confidently past buildings with broken windows. Any one of them could have had useful supplies as far as he was concerned. He didn’t know why they didn’t bother to check any of them, but his dad moved past them like a man on a mission. One of the storefronts they passed had a bunch of books on display just inside the window. Most of them looked like they were still in readable condition which was all that really mattered anymore. He reached past the broken glass to grab the nearest book. The cover didn’t look familiar, so he felt fairly confident that he had not already read and discarded it. Even if it was something he had read before, he couldn’t afford to be picky. There simply weren’t enough books in the world and he was out of options back in the vault. He shoved the book in his bag and hurried to catch up with his dad.

His dad had stopped at the next building over and was shining a flashlight through the broken glass door on the corner. The roof had collapsed towards the back , but the rest of it seemed structurally sound.

“Hurry up, Gladio,” his father called back over his shoulder at him. He didn’t want to be left behind anyway, too dangerous to be alone out there in the wasteland. Besides, his dad would need help with carrying anything they might find. And the sooner they gathered up any supplies they might need, the sooner they would be able to go back to the vault.

He stepped over the broken door frame, careful not to catch his leg on the jagged edges. The place didn’t look like many people had raided it, but most of what had been in the building was thrown in piles on the floor. He could see piles of deteriorating clothing covering who knew what and bicycles on the walls rusting away with bald tires. Lots of camping supplies. Might have been his type of store if he had lived before the war. Living underground didn’t really appeal to him, but it was necessary if he wanted to survive.

“What are we looking for?” he asked, looking around for anything that might be useful. There were racks knocked over and piles of stuff untouched beneath them. He was surprised that there was still so much lying around, but maybe people didn’t want to venture this close to the city. Was there anything safe there, or would it all be too dangerous from radiation?

“Anything that might be useful for someone back in the vault.”

Vague, but he supposed to could work with that. He made his way over to the nearest pile, attuned for even the smallest sounds to come form his Pipboy but the only noise in the building was his dad rustling through a pile about twenty feet away. He toed away the top layer of rotten fabric. Most of the stuff in that pile was too broken or degraded to be of use, so he moved over to the next. He kicked off the top layer of the pile and an abnormally large cockroach scurried out before skittering away to a hole in the wall.

“You need to be more careful than that,” his dad chided him from where he was still sifting through his first pile. “What if that had been an aggressive Radroach? It could be eating your face off and I might have just let it.”

“You would have stopped it,” he countered as he moved onto the next pile. Anything useful was probably snatched up years ago or so far gone that it would be worthless to them now

“I might have waited a bit first. If you weren’t so distracted by girls, you might actually have a good head on your shoulders.”

“I’m not distracted by girls.” He focused in on the pile that he was working on. Maybe the stuff on top had protected the stuff on the bottom and if he dug down deep enough, he might actually find something worth salvaging. He didn’t like the direction that this conversation was headed. His dad was probably going to remind him of his duty to Noct, and that he would be leaving the vault one day so he shouldn’t string any of the young women along or get any of them pregnant. He once tried to argue with his dad that if he did decide to get married he could always take his wife to the next vault with him, but his dad informed him that the list of people permitted to move into the next vault with Noct was very slim. And apparently there were not a lot of women on the list, and he wasn’t exactly sure how that was supposed to work once they got over.

“Cor told me about the other week when you did extremely poorly in your hand to hand combat class.” He vaguely remembered getting his ass handed to him by Cor a few weeks ago. About a few days before Noct’s birthday, and he had been a little distracted trying to decide what to get him. “He said you were acting like a lovesick puppy all day, and he thought it was because of the new graduate who had just joined your class.”

“Who?” He hadn’t even remembered someone joining their class recently. And that was the only time he had been distracted within the past few months, but he hadn’t been thinking about a girl. He had been thinking about Noct.

“Some girl,” his dad said with a dismissive wave of his hand. His dad had not met his mother until they had moved to their current vault. “Cor didn’t give me a name, and I didn’t want to ask.” He couldn’t even remember what the girl looked like that seemed to be causing so many problems for him and his dad. He didn’t like that they were talking about his love life or lack thereof behind his back, but he supposed there was no help for it. “You know nothing can happen with you and this girl, right?” his dad continued, focusing on his own pile of rubbish. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this type of emotional conversation either. If his mom was still around, she would probably be the one warning him about the dangers of falling in love with someone in the vault that he could never be with. It was a little too late for that though.

“I know,” he said, moving on to another pile to look for something useful and to put some distance between him and his dad. He needed to think about something else, like if anything in front of him could possibly be of any use back to someone in the vault. If only his dad knew how bad his problem really was and that it had nothing to do with the girl Cor seemed to think he was mooning over. He pushed aside the top layer of materials that had condensed down into a single disgusting object and started looking at the things underneath it. Most of it appeared to be packages of freeze-dried food, sealed tight against anything from the outside world. He picked up a bag labeled strawberry ice cream, whatever that was, and noticed that the package was intact.

“Hey, dad, I found food!” he called over, grateful both for the discovery and because it would stop his dad from asking further questions about his love life. His Pipboy wasn’t reacting to anything, so he ripped open the foil package and pulled out a small pink square of something. Nothing else on the surface had killed him so far, and at this point, he thought he would rather take his chances on this strange substance then having his dad find out the truth of what had been distracting him in that class. He popped the small square in his mouth and chewed it experimentally. Definitely some type of food, although it was almost as dry as the ration bars they handed out at the vault. Most likely it wasn’t going to kill him either, so while his dad was still making his way over to him, he started to shove some of the foil packages in his bag. There were other flavors as well, and he wondered if any of them tasted any better. It was still different from anything they had back at the vault, and someone might like a treat now or then.

“Good job, Gladio,” his dad told him as he joined him, and Gladio tilted the open bag towards him. His dad took one out and took a small bite out of the corner. “It’s edible at least,” he said before finishing off the rest of it. Edible was a good deal better than some of the other things they had found out on their journey and been forced to eat. He heard a story about a member of the security team that had to feast on the corpses of Radroaches for over a week until it was safe enough to make the journey back to the vault. He had been half crazed from the Rads by the time he made it back, and had spent three months in medical decontaminating. It was a fate he wanted to avoid for himself for as long as possible. Plus, he had seen more than his fair share of Radroaches, and he didn’t think he could ever by hungry enough to stick one of those things in his mouth. His dad bent over and started packing some of the foil packages in his own bag. “The Overseer will be glad that we’ve found food. He’ll probably send more people out this way to see if we can find anymore before somebody else takes it all.”

“Why? Does the Overseer not like the ration bars any more than Noct does?” Granted, it wasn’t the best food in the world, but it was food, and when the alternative was to starve, he would rather eat the ration bars for every meal for the rest of his life.

“We can’t produce ration bars forever,” his dad said as he stood up, cinching his bag tightly shut so he wouldn’t lose anything. “Cover the rest of that back up.”

He did as he was told, taking the mass of fabric and dirt and pulling it back up over the remaining silver packages. He understood that they couldn’t take everything with them now, and even that they would want to hide it from others in case something else came along and wanted a snack. What bothered him was the comment his dad had made about not producing ration bars forever. He knew logically that they had to come from somewhere, but he had never really stopped to think about where that was. They couldn’t grow much down in the vault. They had had some success with hydroponics, but not really enough to feed the entire vault on a consistent basis. How much time did they really have left down in that vault? He was supposed to be leaving within a year or so, but what about everyone else? What about Iris? What about the new vault? Would the new vault have enough to provide for all of them as well as those who were already in it? 

His dad walked up to the cash register counter, and for a brief moment he had the ludicrous idea that his dad actually intended to leave some money and pay for the stuff. Instead he hopped behind the counter and made his way over to the upright cooler standing behind it. The electricity hadn’t worked in years, but his dad opened the cooler and pulled two bottles out from it. He didn’t even bother to close the door behind him, just made his way back around the counter and back over to where he was waiting. 

“Here,” his dad said, handing him one of the bottles. “I think you deserve this.”

The bottle was made out of glass and was encased in a red label that read Nuka-Cola. He had heard rumors, of course, but he didn’t think they were true. Or that he would ever be able to drink one himself. They had never come across one before in all the times he had gone out to the surface. He popped the cap off and took a sip. It was warm and syrupy. He wondered what ever had made that so popular but decided not to ask questions.

“Keep that cap,” his dad instructed before they made their way outside. They would probably have to camp somewhere nearby for the evening since the sun had almost completely dipped below the horizon while they had been inside looking for supplies. They shouldn’t stay up there though. No telling if any of the remaining buildings were safe enough for them to spend the night without worrying about the roof collapsing on them.

A black dog was sitting outside of the building when they came out, a small bag tied around it’s body. It barked up at them, it’s tail wagging and scattering rocks across the sidewalk. “Looks like another letter from Noct’s fiancee,” his dad said.

How many other members of the security team had to deal with this? His dad knew the dog by looks if nothing else, but other people had brought letters back as well. He knelt down beside the dog and reached inside the bag with one hand while giving it some head scratches with the other. The dog panted appreciatively, and he found the letter and pulled it out, catching the corner on the bag. Noct’s full name was scripted on the front, and the envelope was just as white and clean as all the other ones he found. He turned it over to look at the wax seal on the bag, the numbers 82 engraved on the back. Lunafreya’s vault number.

“At least he knows better than to let himself be distracted by random girls in the vault,” his dad said as Gladio tucked the letter in his bag, on top of all the packets of food. “You could learn a thing or two from him watching him.” If only he knew how much trouble watching Noct had already gotten him into.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompto wakes to find his saviors are not what he was hoping for and might be even more dangerous than the storm he had been trying to escape.

Prompto decided he was doing far too much waking up in places where he didn’t know where he was than was strictly necessary as he regained consciousness again, this time on what felt like it may have been a hard mattress on the floor. He didn’t know what the normal number was, but he was sure that he had already exceeded it in his lifetime. He didn’t care to make a further habit of it. This time, however, he was not in quite as much pain although he was still a little sore. His head was bandaged from before, and he slowly sat up to not irritate his body any further and took stock of his surroundings. It was dark wherever he was, but as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could tell that he was in a small room barely big enough for the mattress he was on in a low building that would only give him a few inches above his head if he stood up.

He remembered a little more this time than he had the last. He remembered the storm and trying to find shelter. He remembered finding a stone wall along the side of the road he had been walking on. He remembered falling against the door, completely drained of all his energy, and his head throbbing like it was about to explode. He had felt like everything was over, and then he remembered the door falling open behind him and someone dragging him by the arms. That someone had probably dragged him into this room eventually and then left him here. 

He reached up to touch the bandage on his head. Whoever had found him and dragged him inside had taken the time to treat his injuries as well. They could not have wished him harm, whoever it was that had taken pity on him. He tentatively stood up, reaching out to brace himself on the wall. Wood, even though the building was most likely inside that stone wall. He took a step forward to what he assumed was the door and gave it a very gentle push. The door swung open, leading him into a larger room beyond. No one was in that room either, and with only one high window, it was almost as dark as the room he had just left. So they hadn’t locked him up either. Maybe these strangers wanted to help him. Maybe they would help him to remember where he had come from or where he was going. Better yet, maybe this was where he had come from in the first place and he was back among friends. 

He took a few unsteady steps across the room to what looked like a door to the outside. He pushed on that one, but it only opened a fraction before it was stopped by a small chain running from the door to the outside wall. So they didn’t trust him that much. It was looking less likely that this was the place he had come from, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find a home here. He could always try to force the door open, the wood was old and likely wouldn’t be very hard to break, but he didn’t want to make a bad impression on his hosts. Not if he wanted to stay here. Tempting as it was to make a break for it and to demand that they accept him into their lives, he forced himself to walk back into the room. There wasn’t much for him to do. He sat down on the bare ground and took stock of his surroundings.

There was some food in a basket against the wall closest to the exit. His stomach rumbled at the sight, but he didn’t want to eat it all too soon only to discover that they had no intention of offering him food again. There was a pot over in the corner and it didn’t take much imagination to know what that was for. He opted to ignore that for the time being as well. Eventually, he would have to make use of it, but for now he had some thinking to do. Plus, he didn’t want to be surprised if someone came back. Even though they had tended to his wounds and given him shelter from the storm, they had still locked him up so their intentions might not be good. There was no telling what they planned on doing to him. 

He took stock of his injuries again. His head felt much better, so he could only assume that they had given him something for that. The other various aches and pains in his body were starting to fade away, and he couldn’t even remember where they had all been before he had lost consciousness for the second time. He looked around at the wooden walls and felt very out of place. He didn’t belong here. He reached into his pocket, but although they had left him with his clothes, they had taken the piece of paper that had been in there. The one thing that connected him to where he might have come from. He had no idea what they would even want from that, since he hadn’t been able to make much sense of it. For now though, all he could do was wonder and wait for someone to show up.

Eventually, his growling stomach forced him over to the basket of food. He wasn’t going to eat much. Just enough to get him through the next few hours. There was a large purple fruit on the top of the basket, so he picked that up and retreated back to his spot in the middle of the floor. Now he was almost certain that they were torturing him. Why would they just lock him up without any explanation and with no one even coming to check on him? Whatever they wanted with him it couldn’t be anything good. Maybe he had heard stories of things that happened to people who were taken in by complete strangers, but he couldn’t remember any of them. He just had a vague feeling of unease as he slowly ate the piece of fruit that had been waiting for him. If they were going to poison him, they probably would have just let him die from his injuries instead. Would have saved them some supplies, some bandages, some poison. He took another slow bite from the fruit, trying to remember if he had ever eaten it before. All that did was bring back his headache, so he quickly finished the rest of it off, throwing the pit against the wall. Nobody had bothered to leave him with a waste can other than the bucket in the corner, and there was no telling when someone would be coming to clean that out. If he was lucky, the pit would attract a rat and he might be able to use that for some food. 

The hours passed, or at least he thought it had been hours. He really didn’t have much of a way to tell the time, especially since the sunlight that did come in did not provide much illumination. It could have been noon or dawn or dusk for all the more the light changed. Occasionally, he thought he heard somebody walking past outside the door, talking in low voices, but no one ever came in. They might have been talking about him, or they might have been talking about nothing. Or it could just be a figment of his imagination and there was no one coming to rescue him. He could be down there forever.

He glanced over at the door, willing for someone, anyone to come through it. Someone to let him out. Someone to tell him what was going on. Someone to tell him who he was. No one ever came though, and he had no other form of entertainment but his own thoughts. Things were just as clear as they had been before he had sought shelter here. He still had no idea who he was or where he had come from. Maybe he had no past. But it wasn’t possible for someone to just come out of thin air. He had to have come from somewhere.

His stomach started growling again, and he looked longingly over at the bucket of food that remained. He shouldn’t eat anymore. He knew that he had not been in there a full day yet or else the darkness would have overcome the room. He couldn’t afford to eat any more when he had no idea how much longer he was going to be in there. He would have to hold off on eating for now, until he managed to find a way to get out of there.

Just when he decided not to eat any more, he heard voices outside of the door, and they stopped just outside. He turned towards the door, tensing his body so he was ready for whatever might be coming for him. It sounded like more than one of them. He could handle more than one, maybe two. He hoped. It was torture, not knowing if they wanted to kill him or if they wanted him alive for some more nefarious purposes. Like they were going to sell him for something. The door opened slowly, and a young man and woman entered the room. They didn’t seem to have any weapons on them, and they looked like they were around his age.

They made sure to shut the door quickly behind them, but he had already seen that there were additional guards behinds him, guns in hand. His eyes narrowed, but he tried to shrink in on himself, to make himself seem smaller and less threatening to them. They definitely did not have good intentions for him. He needed to keep his own skills hidden until it was time to make his move. He hadn’t even known he had the necessary skills to survive until that very moment. If he could just get his hands on one of those guns, everything would be just fine. He would survive. He may not know his own identity, but he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would survive.

“Hello,” the young woman said as they both sat crosslegged on the ground across from him. He stared at them silently, unwilling to speak until they asked him a direct question. He needed to figure out who they were. “How do you feel?” she asked with a pleasant smile. Like she was trying to make him feel more at ease. It had exactly the opposite effect, and he couldn’t help but feel that the guards outside would come in with those guns trained on him at any moment.

“Better,” he said curtly, and then thinking that perhaps manners might keep him alive for a little bit longer he added, “thank you.”

“Do you know where you are?” she asked, and he noticed that the man had taken out a small notepad and was jotting down some things. His answers? Was he writing the next great American novel while they were sitting there?

“No,” he said, quite honestly, and the guy frowned as he started scribbling away at the notepad. How could that have possibly been the wrong answer? It wasn’t like the wall had a map on it stating “you are here.” “I’ve never been in the area before.”

“Just passing through?” the woman asked, and he stayed silent. He didn’t know, and he didn’t think they would like any answer they would be getting from him. He couldn’t say he had been going there to visit someone when he didn’t even know where he was. If he said he was just passing through, they might start asking where he was going. He couldn’t answer that one either, so he didn’t want to give them any ammunition to use against them. “Of course you are. You only stopped here because of the storm. What’s your name?”

“Prompto,” he said, maybe a little too quickly. But it was the only thing he knew for sure, and he wanted these people to trust him. It would be rather dangerous for him if they didn’t. Someone who didn’t trust him would be much more likely to kill him. 

“That’s an interesting name,” the man said as he scribbled something down on his paper. Was he suggesting that it wasn’t an actual name, because that had been the one thing he was certain of. Now the guy was trying to imply that there was something wrong with his name.

“Where are you from, Prompto?” the woman asked him. At least she didn’t seem to think there was something wrong with his name, or at least nothing she was going to vocalize. She seemed to have thoughts about other things though, and she was staring at him quite intently. He stared back at her, unsure of how he was supposed to answer that. He didn’t even know enough to make up a location and a backstory. “How old are you?” He didn’t know how to answer that one either, and the man had stopped scribbling on his notepad. “When’s your birthday?” He didn’t know that one. “What’s your favorite color?”

That was a simple one. He should know what his own favorite color was. How was he supposed to remember that when he couldn’t even remember his own name? He was getting frustrated with their questioning and frustrated with himself for not being able to answer them. The other two rose to their feet and headed back towards the door. He felt a warning crawl up his spine, that not everything was as it seemed. He needed to pick his next move very carefully. He wasn’t back up to his full strength, he didn’t need to know who he was to know that, so he couldn’t make his move until he was absolutely certain that it was his last option left to him. They opened the door and nodded to the two guards who were outside, making no pretense that they were out there anymore. They wanted him to know he was under armed guard.

The two with the shotguns came into the room, flanking him while he remained seated on the floor. “On your feet,” the one on his left said while the other one nudged him with the muzzle of the shotgun. He stayed where he was, because if they wanted to kill him they could just as easily do it where he was instead of wherever it was they wanted to take him. They pushed him a little harder this time, rocking him forward. He wouldn’t give up his position on the floor. Not if he could help it. Whatever they intended for him, he had no intention of making it easy for them. They had no intention of killing him there, though, and the other one grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him to his feet. When he refused to move any further than that, one of them, he was starting to lose track of which one was which, hit him with the butt of the rifle on the small of his back, knocking him back down to the ground. One of them yanked him up by his hair this time, tears prickling the corner of his eyes. “Are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way?” they growled, shoving him forward again. They didn’t even bother to bind his hands, probably thinking he was still far too weak to do much to them. Plus, he was unarmed, so they wouldn’t think he would be that much trouble. 

The two who had interviewed him led the way, forcing him to stumble along after them or to deal with the two with the shotguns. They liked throwing their weight around, forcing people to do whatever they wanted, and they probably couldn’t do that with the people who lived inside the wall. So he was forced to deal with all that pent up energy, and they weren’t shy about pushing those shotguns into his back, reminding him of the fate that most likely awaited him. They made their way outside, and he wondered how long he had been unconscious in that little room. The sky was clear, like that storm had never even happened. There were a few two story houses surrounding a deep well in a plaza. He looked over his shoulder and realized that he had been in some type of guard post built against the wall. The other people who lived in the settlement had come outside, standing in front of their houses, watching as he was paraded along in front of them. Paraded along for what exactly he was starting to get an idea. Only the two people behind him were armed with guns, but that didn’t mean the others weren’t well armed. He saw a few baseball bats as people watched him walk by with distrustful eyes.

He was paraded to the porch on the largest house of the square, still flanked by his two guards. They had the shotguns leveled at him, but those guns did not bother him nearly as much as the hungry way the rest of the settlement was looking at him. Like they were out for his blood and were just waiting for the signal to begin.

“The prisoner,” he didn’t remember being taken prisoner “has no recollection of who he is. When asked simple questions about human existence, he could not give us any answers.” Yes, because he didn’t remember anything. Why couldn’t this people understand that? Did no one ever forget anything in his town, or was he the first one he had ever come across? “We at Sanctuary understand that for these transgressions there can only be one punishment.” What an awful name for this village that had brought him in from the storm only to turn him out again. They had bandaged his wounds and now they were holding him at gunpoint. He didn’t exactly think this place was a sanctuary for any one.

“He must be killed, by any means necessary.”

He thought the shotguns would probably be the fastest way to kill him, but it seemed like the bloodthirsty denizens of Sanctuary would much prefer to kill him slowly. And painfully. A few with baseballs bats took a few steps towards him, and he saw that another one was brandishing a screwdriver. They were definitely planning on killing him in the most painful way possible. He didn’t plan on letting them kill him. Not today. He grabbed the shotgun from the guard on the left and quickly used it on the one on the right. The buckshot ripped through him, splattering blood back on Prompto as the guard toppled to the ground, a surprised look forever on his face. He quickly turned around and used the shotgun on its former owner, since they were the two largest villagers and were also more likely to have additional firearms. The man had been in the process of reaching behind his back for something, most likely a small pistol. 

By the time he was done with dispatching his guard, the crowd had started to rush him, aware now that he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. The first woman with a baseball bat swung low, catching him on his shins and nearly making him fall down. He couldn’t, not if he wanted to stay alive. He winced against the pain and took a step backwards to get out of reach of the next group with their baseball bats. His back ran into the front door of the two story house behind him. He may have been armed with the shotgun, but he had no idea how many bullets were left in it, and even if they only had baseball bats and screwdrivers, they outnumbered him. He might be able to take some of them down, but as soon as he stopped to reload, they would eradicate.

He fired one shot off into the crowd before fumbling at the door handle behind him. The blast got the leader of the group, the one hungriest for blood square in the chest and sent him flying backwards against those behind him. He got the door open and fell backwards through the opening, dropping the gun inside in the process. He quickly scrambled to his feet, shutting the door and looking around for something to block it with. There was a small chair just inside the house and he lodged it underneath the door handle. It wouldn’t hold forever, but it would give him time to think. Escape was his best option at this point, and he didn’t know how he was going to pull that off. If the villagers didn’t want to kill him before, they definitely would now that he had killed three of their own. He didn’t even know what he had done wrong. So what if he couldn’t remember a few details about his life, it had to come back to him eventually? He hoped. Someone threw a rock through a window to the left of him, and it wouldn’t be long before someone was brave enough to crawl through. 

He picked the shotgun up off the floor, and raced to the stairs. Upstairs was his only option at this point. Maybe he could find a way to barricade himself up there, and eventually he would be able to just wait them out. They might get tired of it. Or he might find another weapon and another way to defend himself. He was bitterly disappointed on both counts. There was nothing for him to barricade the steps with, and unless someone was hiding weapons in the bedsheets, he didn’t think he was going to have enough time to find anything. Downstairs he could hear people crashing through the windows; he was running out of time. 

Across from the top of the stairs was a large window level with the top of the wall on the outside. The wall was pretty far away, but he didn’t know what his other options were. He moved back to the top of the staircase, ignoring the shouts from the people below him. He was only going to get one shot at this, and if he missed that wall, there would be nothing standing between him and the remaining villagers. If he thought they had been willing to kill him painfully before, he didn’t want to think about how bad it was going to be now. He took a step breath and ran full speed towards the window. 

He jumped right before it, crashing through the glass and getting a number of new cuts to add to his already aching body. His heart sank when he realized he was not going to make it to the wall, and he stretched his arms out, desperate to catch on to anything. His right hand grasped at the very edge of the fall, and he somehow managed to keep from falling. He had to drop the shotgun to reach up with his other hand, and he pulled himself onto the top of the wall. From his new vantage point, he realized how thin the wall actually was, maybe about eight inches wide. He would make a very easy target up there if someone came around to the other side of the house and picked up that shotgun. 

He eased his legs off the outside of the wall, hanging as low as he could before closing his eyes and dropping to the ground. He smelled smoke somewhere behind him. Were they grabbing the torches to go with their pitchforks as they hunted him down? The fall aggravated the earlier injury in his leg, but he had to ignore it if he wanted to survive. He crawled into some nearby bushes for cover, knowing that he only had a few moments before they realized where he had gone and come searching for him. He caught his breath for a moment, breathing into the pain to help relax his leg. He climbed to his feet, using a nearby dead tree for support, and started to stagger off into the woods. 

He knew better than to stay on the road this time. The road offered little cover, and it would probably be the first place they would look for him. Quite frankly, he was getting a little tired of being attacked by strangers simply for existing. He staggered along, every so often checking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being followed. That was his mistake. He was so busy checking for what was behind him that he forgot to look where he was going. 

Which was how he ended up being grabbed by some guy in a strange outfit while his partner patted him down for weapons. Not that they were going to find anything. He had a bad habit recently of losing all weapons he came across. Or maybe that had always been a failing of his and he just now was starting to realize it. Maybe he just wasn’t meant to be alive.

“What do we have here?” a woman asked, stepping into his line of sight. She wasn’t dressed like the people back in the village, she dressed all in black and red leather, and she kept her weapon out in the open, a long pike she could use to gut him from where she stood. He may not remember what the rest of his life had been like, but this was definitely not his day.

“I’m nobody,” he told her since the truth had not been going so well for him. She wasn’t likely to believe him anyway, since he was still covered in blood from those last guards he had killed. If she was going to kill him, he just wanted her to get over with it. 

“I like nobodies,” she said, circling around him while he was held immobile by her followers. “Less messy. Families don’t come running after them asking for them to come home.”

“I don’t have a family.” At least, not one that he knew of. Even if someone did come looking for him, he could always claim that he hadn’t remembered them, which was the absolute truth.

“Where did you get that blood from, Nobody?” she asked as she stopped in front of him again, this time much closer and he was forced to look up at her. 

“There’s a village somewhere back there inside a stone wall. They tried to kill me. So I killed some of them instead.”

“I like your spunk,” she said with a grin. “Tell me, did they ask you a bunch of questions before they decided to kill you?”

She had obviously had some sort of run-in with this village before. Maybe they had tried to kill her at some point. He didn’t know why anyone would want to do that though. Or why anyone would want to try. “Yes,” he spat out.

“Well, Nobody, you’re in luck. Because we don’t ask a lot of questions here, and I could really use someone with your skills.” He didn’t know if he liked the sound of that, especially since the only skill she knew he had was the ability to murder someone, but it sounded better than the alternative. 

Especially if the alternative involved a bunch of people treating him the way the others had back in that village.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is that so?” Gladio asked him lowly. Noct didn’t know when it happened, but somehow he had drifted further up the bed and now he was sitting very close to Gladio. So close that he could feel the heat radiating from him. Either that or it was the low grade radiation poisoning. Whatever the reason, the way Gladio was looking at him made his throat dry. It couldn’t possible mean what he thought it meant. It was probably just the medication they had him on. Or maybe Gladio was just having trouble focusing since he currently only had the one eye to work with. Noct cleared his throat and looked away.

Noct stared at the wall of the vault, tuning out the sound of the instructor at the front of the classroom. A few of the other young adults were talking a few rows in front of him. The instructor didn’t seem to care that he didn’t have the attention of a single student. The instructor sounded like he could fall asleep just talking about the subject.

It was easy to see why this was the last class taught before they were given their aptitude test and career assignments. And it wasn’t just because it was the last latter in the acronym. He didn’t even know how they could justify teaching a class on luck. Like that was really something that could be taught. Maybe that was why no one was paying attention. It was something you either had or you didn’t. No need to subject a class of twenty year olds to a lecture on the subject, him more than the others. It didn’t matter what he was going to get on his aptitude test, because no matter what happened, he was going to be an Overseer.

He tapped the eraser of his pencil off the desk that had seen better days. Someone named Randy had sat there once and left future generations his John Hancock and a crudely drawn dick. Gladio had been gone for far longer than normal. He tried to put on a brave face for Iris; she had enough on her plate without having to worry about whether or not her surviving family members were still alive. When she wasn’t around, however, his own mind was plagued with doubts. Had any one ever been gone from the vault for this long? Was it was possible to survive on the surface for an extended period of time? There were reasons why their ancestors had moved underground. 

Cor’s arrival couldn’t even bring any life into the class. The instructor didn’t even skip a beat. Most of the other students didn’t look up, although a few who had parents who worked security watched him warily out of the corners of their eyes to make sure it was not their desk he was approaching. His heart sank when Cor stopped at his desk and bent down to speak with him.

“Noctis, I need you to come with me,” he whispered so none of the other students could hear him.

Had something happened to his father? Why else would Cor interfere with his lessons? His father was very insistent that he continue to take the classes like everyone else, even though his path was already determined. If something had happened to his father though, they would want to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. No need to send the entire vault into a panic. He tried to draw as little attention to himself as possible as he stood up from the desk and followed Cor out into the hallway.

“Is it my dad?” he asked once they had left the classroom. Just because his father didn’t face a lot of threats down in the vault didn’t mean he was safe.

“Your dad is fine,” Cor reassured him, and he felt a deep sense of relief. “This is about Gladio.”

So much for that feeling of relief. He just thought that Gladio had been delayed a little, not that he wasn’t going to be coming home at all.

“Has anyone told Iris yet?” he asked, deflecting his thoughts away from his own feelings. She was going to be devastated if anything had happened to her brother, and he didn’t know how he was going to comfort her. Plus there was the whole issue of his own grief that he was going to have to work through. He couldn’t deal with that and her at the same time. He needed time to process all of this. He needed details to give him some closure. Like how it had happened, what had done Gladio in, how far away from home he had been when it happened.

“No, not yet,” Cor told him as they made their way through brightly lit passageways to the medical center. “No one saw the need to alarm her unnecessarily until we know the full extent of the damage.”

“Wait, so he’s still alive?” He wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him anyway. “Why did you come get me? Isn’t this something that should be dealt with by his family or maybe the Overseer?” He wasn’t quite ready for this level of responsibility yet. There was probably paperwork that needed to be filled out. Why didn’t they teach classes on being an Overseer? 

“He asked to see you,” Cor said as they reached the pristine white corridors of the medical wing. Now he was getting worried again, because he couldn’t fathom why Gladio would want to see him before his own sister. “I should warn you, he took quite a beating out there.” He really didn’t feel any better about the situation. Cor had seen some pretty horrible injuries in his line of work, so if he thought it was bad, it had to be really bad. Still, Gladio had been gone for a long time, and he was eager to see him again. He didn’t know how it had come to this, getting so lonely without Gladio around, but nobody else would talk to him besides Iris. “Clarus is making his report to the Overseer,” Cor said as they stopped in front of a recovery room with an occupied light lit to the left of the door. “Medic says rads are minimal, so you should be fine without any Rad-X.”

He had never taken the stuff before, but it was a requirement for anyone going to the surface. Gladio said it was awful, the worst thing he had ever tasted, but Noct didn’t see how it could ever be worse than those ration bars. He put his hand on the scanner and took a deep breath as the door slid silently open.

“I should hear Clarus’ report,” Cor excused himself before treading away. The room was dimly lit, making it difficult to see the interior. Which was a shame, because Gladio wouldn’t be able to read any pre-war novels he might have picked up on his most recent excursion. If he had managed to pick anything up. They needed as much space as they could to carry vital supplies back to the vault, but Gladio’s dad was usually pretty lenient about letting him bring back at least one book. And if he hadn’t managed to bring anything back, Noct could always go back to Gladio’s room and pick one up for him. It would be good for him to have something to do while he was in recovery.

Gladio sat upright in the narrow bed, possibly staring at the wall across from him since there wasn’t much else for him to look at in the room. The door whooshed shut behind him once he had entered, effectively shutting him in there. Cor said he didn’t have to worry about rads, so that was one thing to look forward to. He had never been exposed to radiation, although Gladio said you got used to mild levels of exposure after a while. Plus there was always treatments if he ever did manage to get exposed. It might happen on the journey between vaults later.

He couldn’t see much inside the room since the lights were so dim, but he did notice that Gladio had a bandage wrapped around his head. Covering his eye. No wonder the lights were down so low. He wouldn’t have been able to look at much anyway unless he was willing to strain the other one. If the other eye was still working. Was this why Cor had warned him? Had Gladio lost both of his eyes on the last excursion? In that case he supposed someone else would be escorting him to his next vault. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all. It was supposed to be Gladio moving to the next vault with him.

“Gladio?” he said quietly, trying to move closer to the bed without startling him. He didn’t know if Gladio still had his weapons down in the vault, but he didn’t want to risk it. “How are you feeling?” He tried to keep his voice down. Depending on what type of injury he had under that bandage, he might be feeling sensitive to sound as well. Clearly he was sensitive to light, or else he would have had someone bring him one of his books by now if only so he had something to do while he was in the recovery room.

“I’ve been better,” Gladio told him without looking towards him so he still didn’t know the extent of the injury. Gladio would not be coming with him if he was blind. He didn’t even know what Gladio’s future would hold. He certainly wouldn’t be able to work security anymore. Noct took a deep breath and walked further into the room to move to the far side of the bed. Gladio looked up at him with one eye once he walked into his line of sight. 

“What happened to you out there?” he asked, inching closer to the bed. He didn’t want Gladio to think he pitied him, but he was also currently drawn to him. Like he could take away the pain somehow, but he couldn’t do anything more for him than what the medics already had.

“It’s called a Deathclaw,” Gladio told him, not really looking at him but staring past him. He was probably pretty drugged up to help him with the pain, plus they would have to give him some Rad-Away. “We were traveling after dark and the thing got the jump on us.” He couldn’t even begin to imagine what that was like, being out there in the dark. The lights were always on in the vault. “We drove it off, but it already scratched me. My dad used a stimpak on it. Probably saved my eye.”

“Probably?” Most people who got severely injured out in the Wasteland never made it back to the vault. He should be grateful that Gladio had returned to him at all.

“Yeah, well, my dad’s not a medic,” Gladio said, raising his hand to touch the bottom edge of the bandage. “He did the best he could, then practically dragged me back here for proper medical care.”

“When will they know?” he asked as Gladio lowered his hand back down to the bed. It must be hell not knowing. He probably didn’t even know what the wound looked like, not unless his father had given him a detailed description. The bandages had been changed recently and were a nice clean faded yellow. He wondered how long they had been back, but couldn’t find it in him to ask. He didn’t want to know how long Gladio had been in there, wondering about his face and whether or not he would be able to see again.

“Whenever the rest of my face heals enough for the bandage to come off.”

Noct moved closer to the bed and sat down carefully on the edge close to Gladio’s feet. “Is there anything you want me to do?” If Gladio would let him turn the lights on, he could read to him. There had to be a few books laying around that Gladio hadn’t read yet. “Do you need me to tell Iris anything?” She would want to know that her brother was back, even if she wasn’t allowed to go see him. Besides, he could reassure her that Gladio was doing well and didn’t seem too far down in spirits. Things could have been far worse.

“No, Dad’s going to talk to her once he’s done in the Overseer’s office.”

They sat together in silence, listening to the low hum of the air purifier that was supposed to take potential rads out of the air. He didn’t know what to say to him; no words could adequately describe how glad he was that Gladio had returned to them in relatively one piece. How lonely he had been while Gladio had been gone, like there was no one else in the vault as important as him. Gladio wouldn’t want to hear it anyway. He would probably call him a sap and tease him relentlessly about how helpless he was without him.

“How do you feel about an eyepatch?” he asked, looking over at Gladio who seemed surprised by the question.

“What would I need an eyepatch for?”

“In case they have to take your eye out. Cause of radiation poisoning.”

“They’re not going to take my eye,” Gladio said, glaring at him with the eye that remained visible. If looks could kill, Noct would be better off taking his chances on the surface. But Gladio would never hurt him anyway, and he didn’t want Gladio to start sulking about his injuries.

“That’s a shame,” he said with an exaggerated sigh, “because I’m positive you’d be able to pull off the eyepatch look. Like a pirate or something.”

“Is that so?” Gladio asked him lowly. Noct didn’t know when it happened, but somehow he had drifted further up the bed and now he was sitting very close to Gladio. So close that he could feel the heat radiating from him. Either that or it was the low grade radiation poisoning. Whatever the reason, the way Gladio was looking at him made his throat dry. It couldn’t possible mean what he thought it meant. It was probably just the medication they had him on. Or maybe Gladio was just having trouble focusing since he currently only had the one eye to work with. Noct cleared his throat and looked away.

“Yeah, the girls would be tripping over themselves trying to get to you.” Maybe more than just the girls too, but that wasn’t something that was talked about in the vault. Certainly not for him, since he had a fiancee waiting for him in another vault. The fate of humanity rested on his family lineage. At least that was what the people who had built the vault had left behind in their notes, and he couldn’t let it end with him. No matter how Gladio may or may not be looking at him. He inched a little further away from Gladio, although he wasn’t sure if he did it because he didn’t want to give Gladio the wrong idea or because he wasn’t sure if he would be able to stop himself.

“Speaking of girls,” Gladio said, leaning away from him and Noct couldn’t help but think that he looked disappointed. “We got a letter from your fiancee out on the surface.”

“Do you still have it?” They might have been forced to leave it behind when Gladio had been injured. Or maybe it had been sent off for processing with everything else they had brought back with them.

“It’s in my bag,” Gladio said, tilting his head towards the far corner before leaning back against the pillows on the hospital bed.

He hadn’t even noticed the bag sitting in the corner along with Gladio’s vault suit. He left the bed to go to the bag. They must not have been too concerned with radiation if they hadn’t sent the stuff for decontamination. His Pipboy was quiet as he opened the bag, trying to ignore the dried blood on Gladio’s clothes and falling miserably. That was a lot of blood. They had come dangerously close to losing him and then what they would have done?

The letter from Lunafreya was easy enough to find considering it was right on top. Letters from Lunafreya always gave him pause, not because he wasn’t happy to hear from her, but because they always raised questions. Like how those dogs managed to keep those letters so clean while carrying them through the wasteland. Or how she even managed to find pristine white paper in the first place. Or how she had managed to train dogs to traverse the wasteland and find someone from security from his specific vault. He kept the letter close to him as he carried it back over to Gladio’s bedside, this time making sure to sit down in the chair next to the bed.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” Gladio asked as Noct sat next to him with the unopened letter in his hands. He probably should. She would be expecting a response from him within a week or so, and it wouldn’t do to keep her waiting. She might get worried about him, and Gladio was likely to chide him about keeping a lady waiting.

“Maybe later,” he said, stuffing the letter in between his leg and the arm of the chair. It would be safe there. “It’s too dark to read in here anyway.” Besides, Luna was in a vault of her own, and Gladio was here with him now. Given how uncertain the future was for any of them, he would much rather focus on Gladio while he was still here with him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ignis looked over at Ravus, at the metal arm with the end that looked more like claws than like fingers. He had lost his arm out in the wasteland a few years ago, fighting something that he didn’t like to talk about. “Why don’t you let you give you a better arm?” He could give him something better, something that looked far more realistic.

Ignis peered over the top of his glasses at the computer screen he had been working at for the past three hours. He would have liked to have left this cursed lab with everyone else two hours ago, but he had no choice but to stay. A few of the others gave him sympathetic looks on their way out the door, but no one offered to stay and help. He couldn’t blame them. They wanted to keep their jobs and stay alive, and the easiest way to do that was to stay on the good side of those in charge. Which was where he was not. If he wanted to not fall further from their graces, he couldn’t leave until these reports were done, even if that meant he was there until two in the morning.

He sighed and resumed typing. He might as well just spend the night in the building. He could always sleep on the floor under the desk. At this rate, by the time he was done with these reports, it would be too dark to safely travel back to his house. Granted, they had guards to keep the worst things out of the compound, but he wasn’t always to sure he trusted them. After all, the guards worked for the same company he did, and were just as likely to kill him under direct orders as they were to protect him from anything that might have slipped through their defenses.

He had no choice but to accept the extra work as part of his punishment, especially when he knew how much worse it could have been. They could have killed him. By all rights, they should have killed him. The fact that they had let him live was a testament to how much they needed him for their most recent project. That didn’t mean he had to like it, or even be cooperative about it. The more difficult he could make their lives, the more he felt like he was actually making a difference in the world.

“Aren’t you finished with those reports yet?” a man asked from behind him, and he didn’t need to turn around to know who was talking to him. He had heard far more than he wanted to from the man, especially since this last incident had really brought him to the attention of the higher ups. 

“Don’t you have someone else to harass, Ravus?” he asked without breaking his typing stride. If they sent Ravus to check on how his reports were coming along, they had probably changed the parameters. Like now instead of just doing the extra work, he would have to do it within a certain amount of time if he wanted to stay alive. Apparently, staying late after work was not in their plans for him.

“There’s no one else here. Anyone else with intelligence has already gone home for the evening.”

“What’s that say about you?” he asked. Maybe he could save his work and finish tomorrow. Or he could just let them slide by for a few more months. They weren’t going to kill him yet. He was the only one with information that they needed to know, information he had so far refused to give to them.

“I’m supposed to be escorting you home.” Or he was wrong and this was it. They had sent Ravus to kill him. Couldn’t they have sent someone else to do the deed, or was it really necessary to torture him one last time? 

“I can’t go home until these reports are finished. Unless your masters have given you other orders.”

“Plans have changed,” Ravus told him. He saved his work before powering down his work terminal. He would have to finish those reports tomorrow provided he was still alive. He took his time standing up, organizing the files on his desk and making sure all the pens were back in their proper places. If he could make Ravus just as miserable as he was, if only for a little bit, it would be a day well spent. “Hurry up with that. They want to lock the building up for the night.”

“Maybe they shouldn’t have given me so much paperwork to complete if they wanted to lock the building up in a timely fashion,” he said as he pulled his jacket on and turned around to look at Ravus. He looked just as disgruntled about being there as he sounded. He probably would have much preferred to be home with his family, but instead he was here, escorting someone back to their home who was probably the last person he wanted to see at the moment. The only person who had been punished more for Ignis’ transgression had been Ravus, and he would gladly do it again given the opportunity.

“You know they just gave you all that paperwork as busy work to keep you from any more incidents, don’t you?” Ravus asked him with narrowed eyes as he approached. Actually, he hadn’t known that, but he wasn’t about to let Ravus know that. He also wasn’t going to waste time doing it correctly in the future now that he knew it didn’t even mean anything.

“Is that why you’re on escort duty? To prevent any further incidents?”

“If you ever try anything like that again, I’ll kill you personally,” Ravus said as they started walking towards the main entrance. 

“You could always chose to be proactive and do it now,” he suggested, and Ravus glared sideways at him like he shouldn’t be tempting him so much. He wouldn’t do it though, not without a direct order from his superiors. His problem was that he followed the rules a little too closely.

“If it was up to me, I would,” he said as they approached the front door and Ravus unlocked it. “But for some reason, the higher ups think you can be persuaded to rectify your mistake.”

“And what do you think?” he asked as he waited in the cold for Ravus to lock the door behind him. He may not have liked the man, but he wasn’t about to go wandering off without him. Scientists were not allowed weapons within the complex, but that didn’t mean they were safe.

“I think it wasn’t an accident,” he said as they stared walking again. “I think you knew exactly what you were doing when you released the asset.”

“Why would I do that? I was injured during the escape.” He had been out of work for over two weeks recovering in the hospital, and when he came back they had stripped him of his title, took him out of research and development, and started giving him the busy work. It would have been quite foolish of him to release something that might injure him in the process. 

“Maybe you didn’t believe the warnings about how dangerous the asset really was.” Hardly, he had a hand in the design. “Maybe you just wanted to see what happened. Maybe the scientist in you wanted to study the asset in an open environment.”

He couldn’t exactly study anything when he didn’t have a location. It wasn’t like they had a long distance monitoring system in place. And despite what the higher ups may have thought, he actually had no clue what had happened to the asset once it had left the facility. It could have been decommissioned within a mile of them and they would never know the difference. He just needed them to believe that he knew exactly where to find the asset if he chose to disclose its location, or else they would most definitely decide that he had outlived his usefulness.

“Are they still going to send you out to hunt the asset?” At least once they sent Ravus away, he would be able to get some respite. 

“Eventually. They want a more exact location before they risk sending me out into the wasteland.” 

Ignis looked over at Ravus, at the metal arm with the end that looked more like claws than like fingers. He had lost his arm out in the wasteland a few years ago, fighting something that he didn’t like to talk about. “Why don’t you let you give you a better arm?” He could give him something better, something that looked far more realistic. Then maybe Ravus wouldn’t go so many stares when he was walking around in public. No, he probably would. It was more than likely his personality that caused people to cow away from him.

“This arm is fine,” Ravus said, clenching the talons of his false arm reflexively. “It serves me well enough.” 

Maybe; it certainly helped scare people away from him. Ignis didn’t live far from the facility, and nothing attacked them on the short walk. He probably would have been able to make the distance himself, but when he got to his house, he saw one of their guards standing outside the only door. They were keeping an eye on him them, probably to make sure that he didn’t run off any where before he could help them recover their asset.

“Enjoy your evening,” Ravus told him sarcastically before walking off into the night. The guard was eerily silent as he made his way into his house, and he was going to have a hard time forgetting that it was out there.

If he was smart, he would just go straight to bed, try to forget about everything terrible that was happening, and go to work in the morning without trying to bring too much attention to himself. He didn’t even make his way back to the bedroom, just sat down at the kitchen table in the dark. Things had gotten out of control recently, but he should have known that would happen when he signed on for the job. 

He knew the asset was dangerous. There was no avoiding that fact. If the asset were to fall into the wrong hands, the results could be catastrophic. On the plus side, outside of the Institute, no one would be able to recognize the asset for what it was and would not be able to use it for mass destruction. The only thing keeping him alive at the moment was the Institute’s belief that he knew where the asset was, and that he would be able to get it back for them so they could be the ones to use it for destruction. All because he had been present when the asset had managed to escape. Well, actually, he was the one who had set the asset free, but he still didn’t know what had happened once it was gone. It could be anywhere by now.

He was going to have to come up with another convincing story if he wanted to stay alive for a little longer. On the other hand, he hoped he never had to see the day when the asset was recovered and dragged back into the facility. He didn’t know if he would be able to stomach it.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aranea takes in Prompto.

Aranea had provided him with an old shotgun that had strong recoil and was just as likely to knock him out as it was to take out the person he was aiming it at. He held it close to him, staring at the stone walls of the village that had tried to kill him for no other reason that existing. Aranea was about ten feet away, going over the strategy with her two lieutenants while about twenty other Raiders waited in the forest behind them. The strategy seemed simple enough, and mostly consisted of killing anyone alive in the village. First, he was going to have to act as bait though, to make sure that they would open the gates while the rest of the Raiders lay in wait. Rather than put him in unnecessary danger, Aranea was going to be at his side the entire time. She was going to be on the front lines, right up against the wall to take out the first ones who came through. She had told him earlier that it would be best if they all came out at once, that way they wouldn’t have to waste time chasing down any stragglers.

“You ready, Shortcake?” She walked back over to where he was crouched on the ground and slapped him lightly on the shoulder, the impact still strong enough to nearly knock him over.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he murmured. There was a distinct possibility that someone in the village would kill him before Aranea and her Raiders swooped in. It would be a shame to be killed by someone he had just narrowly escaped a few days before. Aranea had wanted to give him time to rest up, to allow his injuries to heal before she had come to him with her plan. He could join her Raiders. He would have food, whatever shelter they could find, and she would provide him with his first weapon. All he had to do was act as the bait so they could get inside that walled village. He didn’t know if she thought there was some sort of treasure in there or something, but he didn’t care why she wanted inside so badly. He would much rather take his chances with Aranea and her Raiders than try to survive on the road again.

“Don’t worry, they deserve everything that’s coming to them,” she said as if his only hesitation was due to the massacre that they were about to perform. That had factored into it slightly, but it was far behind his own instinct for survival. And going anywhere near that village made all his instincts rage at him and tell him to run as far as he could the other way.

“Are you sure about that?” Most of them, yes, or at least the ones that had been so willing to kill him. But there had to have been at least one good person in there, one person who was still worth saving.

“Just think of what they did to you,” she said, and she knew, because she had wrenched every single last detail from him while one of her medics had been treating to his other injuries that the village had neglected to tend to. “Do you honestly think you’re the first person they’ve tried to murder? They ask those questions for a reason, and if you don’t answer them correctly, they’ll torture you to death.” He remembered the screwdrivers some of them had held as they walked towards him with bloodthirsty stares, and he shuddered.

“What are those questions for?”

“I don’t know.” She had to. She knew that people who did not answer them correctly were killed, and if they were killed, she wouldn’t be able to get a testimony from them on what they had experienced before hand. “It’s time. We’ll attack them while the sun’s in their eyes.”

She and one of the lieutenants led the way while the rest of the Raiders hung back on the other side of the road. They would wait for the signal. Aranea pressed herself up against the wall to the left of the gate and nodded towards him. He rose to his feet, grabbing the bottle one of the Raiders had given him earlier and walked across the road. He had to ignore all the warning cries in his head, the ones that told him this was a bad idea and that if he wanted to survive he needed to get as far away from that village as possible as fast as his legs would carry him.

“Hey, jerkfaces!” he called once he was halfway across the road. He threw the bottle at the gate, the glass shattering and falling to the ground. They did deserve everything that was coming to them. Who knew how many other people they had already killed? And for what? Because he couldn’t remember what his favorite color was? “You want to kill me! Come and get me!”

For a moment, he thought they weren’t going to take the bait. That maybe they had decided he wasn’t worth the trouble of losing any more people. This whole plan hinged on them still wanting him dead. Aranea was convinced that they would jump at the chance to finish him off. He wasn’t so sure. They knew they were safe behind their walls. Even if they would rather see him dead, they probably would prefer it if he would come beyond their gates instead of coming outside to him. Aranea shifted her weight beside the door, adjusting her grip on her pike. If she didn’t get to use it on one of those villagers sometime soon, she might decide she had no other use for him other than keeping her weapon well used. His palms started sweating, and he wiped them on the front of his pants. He started counting his breaths to stay calm, waiting for someone to come out. One. Just to be safe, he raised the shotgun and aimed it at the door. Two. They wouldn’t think he would be able to come back armed. Three. He had nothing when he had been brought outside, and he had been forced to leave the other shotgun behind in order to make his escape. Four.

The door opened and one of the villagers came through with a gun in hand. They had more weapons than the two shotguns they had been using to keep him in line. The other villagers had just wanted to kill him in the most painful way possible and had searched for other implements to carry out their will. He didn’t think, didn’t bother to look if he recognized the person from the mob that had tried to kill him or not. He just fired. The man fell back against the person who had been right behind him, and Aranea whipped around the corner, pointy end of the pike first. She impaled the next person who tried to go through, and her lieutenant on the other side of the door whistled low three times in rapid succession. That was the signal for the other raiders to make their attack. Aranea was the first through the gate, pushing her way past the next villager who tried to block her.

The Raiders ran past him while he stayed in the middle of the road, staring blankly ahead at the walled village that had tried so hard to kill him. He tried to drudge up some type of pity from them. He could hear them screaming, begging the Raiders for mercy. Aranea figured the Raiders outnumbered the villagers by at least two to one, but she had never actually been inside the village. Most of her knowledge about what went on within those walls had come from distance surveillance and what she had manged to pry out of him. He didn’t think he was much help, given that he was unconscious when he had been dragged inside and had been in that dark room for most of the time that he was awake. He had been able to give her more information about the layout of the village than she had managed to get from years of surveillance.

He tried to dredge up some pity for those poor souls who were most likely getting massacred inside the walls. Massacred because he had given Aranea all the information she had needed and had killed two of their own guards himself before Aranea even had a chance to get inside. He had left them severely weakened. No matter how much he stayed out here in the road, their deaths were on his hands. And he couldn’t even find a single molecule of pity to spare for them. They would have killed him. Aranea had said they had killed people before him. And if the raiders hadn’t gone to take care of them, they probably would have killed more people. They couldn’t let that happen.

He didn’t want to help though. Didn’t know if he had the stomach for it, no matter what those people might have done. He supposed it was possible that not all of the people in the village would have helped to kill him. Maybe some abstained. But they hadn’t tried to stop it either, and he didn’t think Aranea was going to discriminate when it came to killing them.

Eventually the screams died down, and he knew that it was finally over. They wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone any more. Aranea had told him how this was going to go down. Once they were done, they were going to search the village for any useful supplies. She would give him his fair share, and then he was free to either go on his own way or to join her and her Raiders. He really hadn’t given it much thought before now.

She came back out through the gate and strode towards him, her long gait covering the distance in no time.

“I thought you would want in on the fun, Nobody,” she said as she reached him. He couldn’t possibly see how it would have been fun.

“I’ve had enough fun in there,” he said, staring in through the open gate. From where he was standing, he could see the large building at the back of the square. The broken window on the first floor had been boarded up. The building he had made his escape from. One of the Raiders exited the building and threw a torch in behind them. If they couldn’t use it, then they didn’t want anybody else to be using it either. He never wanted to see the inside of that place again.

“We found another shotgun,” she said. “Much better than the one I let you borrow for this mission.” That wouldn’t have taken much. Then again, he remembered the shotgun he had stolen the first time and how much better it had worked than the old thing he had in his hands now. If he was going to survive instead of getting knocked out all the time, he was going to need weapons. Or at least one weapon. This world was a much crueler place than he had imagined. “It’s yours if you’d like.”

“Thanks.” There would be more people in this world. They might be like Aranea. They might be like the people in the village that had tried to kill him. Or they might just ignore him. He didn’t want to take his chances any more though.

“So, what’s next for you, Nobody? Gonna try to find some more kind souls to take you in, or do you think you’ll stay with us?”

The next group of people might try to kill him. He was less likely to wake up unconscious if he had other people surrounding him, people who could watch his back while he slept. Aranea’s raiders had taken him in within a second thought. As long as he pulled his weight, he would get his fair share of food and a safe place to sleep at night. He was not guaranteed that surety if he tried to go anywhere else. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that the best place for him to be right now was with Aranea. Who cared where he was going before? He would rather join her Raiders and stay alive then continue on his mission and die.

“My name’s Prompto,” he said as more of the village went up in flames, the pyre of smoke rising up into the sky. “And I’m with you.”


	8. Chapter 8

The whole vault seemed to be in a good mood, with almost all of them gathered in the Atrium. A few came up to him and offered him their congratulations. He was sure that he had never seen some of them before, but they might have just been feeling generous because of the free booze. He had been as concerned as everyone else when the Overseer had called everyone to the Atrium because he had an announcement to make. The Overseer rarely called the entire vault together for anything, unless it was serious. Usually when someone important died or something. As Noct joined the rest of them gathering into Atrium, the current of unease dropping his own spirits, he had looked around for Gladio or Iris and failed to find either of them. There were just too many people in the vault, and when they were all crowded together like this, all he could see was a sea of blue. 

He thought about making his way to the upper walkway, not because he wanted to get a closer look at his father, but because he might be able to catch a glimpse of Gladio and Iris from up there and catch up with them as soon as his father was done with his announcement. He had tried to move to the stairway, easing his way in between people, most of whom didn’t even recognize him, but when he reached the first stair and looked up, he realized how hopeless the cause was. The stairway and upper levels were already packed like sardines in a can, and there was no room for him up there. Maybe Gladio would be able to find him after the announcement was over. Gladio did seem to have an incredible knack for finding him in the most impossible of circumstances. Like he had a built in Noct-sense or something.

The Overseer arrived on the balcony outside of his office, and a hush fell across the Atrium where earlier there had been a tide of whispers. He didn’t even have to say anything, they all just stopped talking as soon as they noticed he was there. He wondered if he would ever have that kind of respect at his next vault. 

“I know a lot of you are worried about the nature of this meeting,” his father addressed them in a voice that carried but was not demanding. “I would like to take the opportunity to assure you that we are here on a joyous occasion. I have received notification that my son, Noctis,” he gestured towards him and a few of the people closest to him turned to look at him as if they were suddenly seeing him for the first time, “is set to wed Lunafreya, from Vault 226 on the twenty-third of October this year.” That wasn’t that far off, and the people closest to him suddenly wanted to shake his hand and congratulate him. It suddenly seemed like there was so much he still wanted to do in this vault. “In celebration, everyone in the vault is entitled to unlimited champagne.”

That was a big deal, and was what probably switched the mood from hushed anxiety to good cheer. As soon as his father had made the announcement, Mr Handy’s swept into the room and started handing out glasses. One unceremoniously shoved a glass into his hand before moving onto the next person. The robots had an easier time moving through the crowd than he did.

Which was how he had found himself in a room surrounded by hundreds of people celebrating his upcoming wedding, or celebrating the free booze that had come along with it, and never feeling more alone in his life. He still didn’t know where Gladio or Iris were, and most of the people who had come along to congratulate him had never said two words to him before in his entire life. He sighed and downed his entire glass of champagne in one gulp. It tasted different somehow, but he couldn’t quite place his finger on what the difference was. No sooner had he emptied the glass then a Mr. Handy came along and refilled it for him. For some reason, the Overseer wanted to get the entire vault well and truly drunk. He debated about simply emptying the second glass onto the ground, but he was certain that the Mr. Handy would just come back around and fill it up again.

He wanted Gladio around. At least any congratulations he offered wouldn’t sound so hollow. Sometimes he thought Gladio was the one person who actually cared about how he felt. He would see that there was something wrong with this.

“So, they finally set a date,” a deep voice said from behind him, and he quickly turned around, spilling some of his champagne in the process. A Mr. Handy floated around to top his glass off before moving on to someone else again. “Did Lunafreya mention anything about it in her last letter?”

“No,” he said quickly, but honestly he didn’t know. He had never read the letter. When the medics had come along to tell him that he had to leave because Gladio needed his rest, he had completely forgotten about the letter. It must have fallen down beside the chair or something. Gladio was not kept in medical for long, and by the time he remembered, the room had already been cleaned out. He was pretty confident most of the stuff had been sent to either be incinerated or decontaminated, and he didn’t think the letter would be able to survive either. Besides, if there was anything important in there, it was probably just a heads up about the wedding date. Most of the letters were usually just updates on what she had been doing and asking about his general well-being. Even still, once the celebration was over, he should probably think about writing a return letter. The dogs would be expecting it within a few days.

“Want to get out of here?” Gladio asked him, inclining his head towards the nearest exit. There were about twenty people standing in the way between them and escape, but it would probably be worth it. He would get to spend some time with Gladio, and he wouldn’t have to deal with virtual strangers who had never spoken to him before coming up and congratulating him. More like they thought he was to thank for the limitless alcohol. It wasn’t like his dad to be so liberal with either food or drink, but he guessed if it was a special enough occasion he could afford to be a little more lenient.

“Absolutely.” For one thing, a Mr. Handy couldn’t keep coming around to refill his glass if there were no Mr. Handy’s around, and he knew exactly where they could go for that. Gladio led the way through the crowd, using his larger bulk to more or less force people out of his path. Noct followed closely behind him, hoping no one would see him trying to make his escape, or try to rope him into a lengthy conversation about how generous his father was.

A man started to approach them with a huge grin, and he looked like the type that would be able to talk to him for hours even though they had never officially met before. Gladio stopped the guy with one hand on his chest before he could get too close, and the man’s face fell.

“I need to get Noctis to the Overseer’s office,” Gladio informed him gruffly. The freshly healed scar made him look more intimidating, and the guy took a step back without further prompting. “He has some very important wedding planning to get to.”

“Of course,” the guy said, nodding his head excessively. “Wouldn’t want to keep him from the Overseer.” He disappeared back into the crowd, and no one else tried to stop them before they got to the exit.

“We’re not really going to my dad’s office, are we?” Noct asked once they were out in the hallway, the sounds of the party receding behind them. Most people were staying in the atrium to celebrate his upcoming wedding, and the hallways were eerily empty. That was better for him, because no one would be able to track him down and ask him a bunch of questions. Like how he felt about his upcoming wedding to a woman he had only met through letters. Or how he felt about the fact that he was going to be leaving the vault soon, leaving behind everything he had ever known for his entire life.

“Of course not,” Gladio said as he walked down hallways that seemed just a little bit darker than they had the day before. Maybe his dad was diverting power away to keep the atrium well lit, especially if he didn’t think people would be coming back this way. “But nobody’s going to interfere with the Overseer’s wishes.”

He tried to keep close to Gladio as he led the way, like he could easily hide behind him if somebody would come from the other direction. He didn’t want anyone to know where he was at the moment, and he smiled when he realized Gladio was taking him to that back room that didn’t have any cameras. Not that anybody was watching the cameras at the moment. It looked like the entire security team had been invited to the celebration as well. Which made him wonder who was watching the door, but if it had stayed safe for this long, a few hours was not likely to break it. Besides, Cor would be watching whoever was supposed to go on duty next and make sure they weren’t drinking too much. Or maybe the Mr. Handy’s weren’t supposed to give them refills.

He needed time away from everyone to process. When there was no wedding date set, it had seemed so far away. Like he could just enjoy living in this vault now, without any responsibilities. Now that a date was set, it all seemed painfully real. He was going to leave the vault, traverse the wasteland, and move to another vault where he was going to marry a woman he had never met except for letters. Now that it seemed like it was coming so soon, it seemed like he didn’t have enough time left to do all the things he wanted to do in this vault. If he was perfectly honest with himself, he didn’t want to marry someone he had never met. He would much rather spend his life with someone he chose for himself. But because of the plans for the vault, he knew he couldn’t do that. Something in his DNA was the key to keeping humanity alive, and the only way to ensure that was for him to pass his DNA on with someone else who had been carefully chosen specifically for that purpose. For all he knew, she didn’t want anything to do with him either, and the letters were just her way of trying to get to know him before they had to get married. 

Gladio preceded him into the dark room and pulled out a small electric lantern they kept back there for whenever they wanted some privacy. Gladio turned the lantern on and Noct shut the door firmly behind him. He didn’t think anyone would know to look for them here, except for maybe Iris, and she probably wouldn’t be looking for them for quite some time. Not unless someone asked her too, and if Gladio had talked to her first, she might pretend to not know about this place.

“Are you going to drink that?” Gladio asked pointing to his hand, and for the first time since they left the atrium Noct realized he had still been carrying the glass of champagne with him. He also noticed that Gladio did not have a glass, which seemed odd considering the Mr. Handy’s had been quite adamant about making sure everyone had something to drink. It probably had something to do with the fact that Gladio was supposed to be working security. So he shook his head and extended the glass to Gladio. Gladio took the glass from him and downed the entire glass in one gulp.

Noct froze, waiting for a Mr. Handy to zoom in and refill the glass, but it seemed they were well and truly alone. It wasn’t until Gladio put the glass down on a wooden crate that he started to relax, all the tension seeping out of his shoulders. 

“I think the Overseer is trying to run the vault dry of champagne,” Gladio said before walking away to sit down on one of the lower crates they often used for a seat. Noct followed after him, sitting down on the floor on a pile of pillows they had gathered together over the years. It was more comfortable than the crates Gladio usually sat on, but they hadn’t gathered enough pillows to make a second seat for him yet. It was incredibly difficult to sneak stuff out of the living quarters into other areas of the vault, especially if a Mr. Handy caught them. He was usually the one who got caught, dragged to the Overseer’s office to explain to his father why they were taking supplies from living quarters to unused portions of the vaults. He had never come up with a satisfactory explanation, and usually ended up grounded for a week as a result.

“Why would he do that?” he asked once he was as comfortable as he could possibly get on those pillows. Gladio didn’t respond to him right away as if he was debating whether or not it was safe to tell him.

“I have no idea,” Gladio finally answered him, and Noct couldn’t help but feel just a little disappointed that Gladio didn’t seem to trust him enough with whatever he suspected. Maybe it was because it was the Overseer’s son, but that had never caused Gladio to withhold information from him before. “So, you’re about to be a married man,” Gladio continued in a very transparent effort to change the subject.

“Don’t worry. My first job as Overseer is going to find someone for you to marry so you can suffer right along side me.”

“What if I don’t want to be married?” Gladio asked him.

“I wasn’t given a choice,” he said as Gladio dropped down onto the ground at the perimeter of the pillow seat. “Why should I give you the option to get out of it?”

“That’s a real shame,” Gladio said before leaning forward, and now he was definitely moving into his space. Before he had a chance to wonder about it too much though, Gladio closed the distance between them, kissing him very lightly like a feather, lips lingering like he didn’t want to pull away. All the pieces that had been rolling around in his head tumbled into place, this was what he had been waiting for, this was why it bothered him so much every time Gladio wasn’t around. By the time he had processed all that, he didn’t have time to properly react before Gladio was retreating back outside where the blanket pooled on the floor.

He moved to his hands and knees and crawled over the blanket until he could reach Gladio again. Maybe the champagne was making him bolder than he normally would be, or maybe it was his upcoming nuptials that made him decide that if he was ever going to make his move he should do it now before he lost the opportunity forever, but he put his hands on Gladio’s shoulders and kissed him, a bit more boldly than Gladio had done to him. He understood; Gladio had been worried that he would be rejected when he made the first move. Noct didn’t have that worry and pulled Gladio back onto the pillow pile with him. He moved his hands from Gladio’s shoulders to tangle them in his hair, trying to pull him closer. Gladio’s beard rasped against his vault protected skin, but he didn’t want him to pull away. Gladio’s hand cupped the small of his back, pulling him even closer. He got the distinct impression that those vault suits were going to be inconvenient for both of them very quickly. Especially since he wanted nothing more than for Gladio’s hands to be on his bare skin and there was no easy access. 

Gladio pulled away from his mouth to leave a trail of kisses along his jaw before turning his attention to his neck. Noct arched up against him, cursing those suits and the lumpy piles of pillows underneath him.

“Maybe-” he started, but got distracted by the things Gladio was doing to him, “maybe we should go somewhere more comfortable,” he suggested, although if it wasn’t for those damn suits, he would have wanted nothing more than to get down to business right there. This room was still classified as public, however, and he didn’t want to know how people would react if they caught him with his pants down with Gladio literally minutes after the date for his wedding to someone else had been announced.

“What did you have in mind?” Gladio asked, pulling away from him and looking down at him. It was a good thing Gladio would be making the trip with him to the next vault, or else he was really going to miss that face. 

“Somewhere like your bedroom,” he suggested, because at least there they would get some privacy. No one besides Gladio’s family should be in their quarters, and it might be a while before they decided to leave the party. 

Gladio grinned before rising to his feet, hauling Noct up with him.

“Take it easy,” he protested. “I’m a delicate vault dweller.”

“You won’t be by the time I’m done with you,” Gladio said lowly before reaching over to turn off the light. They fumbled their way through the darkness to the door, Noct still pressed firmly against Gladio’s side. It took a while for them to get there, partially because of the darkness, but mostly because Noct decided to distract Gladio as frequently as he could by kissing any areas he could reach that were not covered by a blue vault suit. Which resulted in frequent kisses to his jaw and neck as they stumbled along together. Eventually, they reached the door and Gladio managed to fumble the door open with one hand while his other hand cupped Noct’s jaw as he kissed him again. Light poured into the room, and Gladio stepped outside without him, looking to see if there was anyone in the hall. Gladio reached back in to grab his hand, and they took off at a light jog back to the living quarters, Gladio never letting go of his hand.

~*~*~

Noct had a killer headache when he woke up the next morning, and he was starting to suspect that the champagne had been laced with something a little stronger. So he could keep the entire vault occupied while he took care of something else, a small voice told him, but he didn’t want to believe it. Everything his dad did was for the good of the vault, even if people couldn’t immediately see that. He was also a little cold, but he attributed that to the fact that he never slept naked and was just unused to it.

He rolled over, his body instinctively seeking out Gladio’s heat that he knew was there somewhere. He found him relatively quickly, the beds weren’t exactly big down in the vault, and he wrapped his arms around his middle before inching closer and burying his face against his chest. He would get warm soon enough there. He was probably already late for his classes, so he should just stay there for as long as he possibly could. Who knew when the next time would be that the whole vault was distracted that he and Gladio would be able to carve out another moment for themselves like this.

“Morning,” Gladio murmured into his hair before tightening his arm around him. 

“Morning,” he sighed back, melting into Gladio’s side. He could definitely stay here forever, and he hoped Gladio didn’t have to report to duty any time soon. Maybe they should talk about what had happened, or what was going to happen once he was married. That could wait. All he wanted to do was lay there and enjoy Gladio’s company. The rest of the world could wait for a little bit.

The door whooshed open and light flooded into the room, temporarily blinding him. “Gladdy, dad says if you’re late for breakfast again he’s going to have your surface privileges rescinded for two weeks,” Iris said from the door, sounding far too alert and cheerful for whatever time of morning it was supposed to be. He was suddenly very glad that the blanket was still on him, practically up to his chin, because he didn’t need any stories to start swirling around the vault so soon. “Oh,” she said, and he could hear in her voice that her entire demeanor had changed without even looking at her, “I didn’t realize you were here, Noct. Sorry.”

She left the room almost as quickly as she had barged in, the door whooshing shut behind her, and the content feeling he just had was replaced with a sinking dread settling into his stomach.

“How much do you think she saw?” he asked as Gladio sat up, the blanket sliding down to reveal chiseled abs that he probably should have taken the time to map last night. This might be the last time he ever saw them depending on how much Iris talked.

“Nothing she can prove,” Gladio said, running his hands through his hair. He didn’t seem too nervous about it, even though he had just as much to lose as he did. “I’ll take care of her. You should probably get dressed and get home before your dad starts to wonder where you are.”

“I’ll just tell him I spent the night here. He won’t question it.” He should still get back though. He did have classes to attend to, and he couldn’t change his habits too much or else people might start to suspect that something had happened. He crawled out of the bed, leaving behind the warmth of Gladio’s bed, and moved to where his vault suit was discarded on the floor. He quickly put it on, trying to stave off the cold. Had the vault always been this cold and he had just never noticed it before? 

“Hey, Noct,” Gladio said, grabbing his wrist right before he was about to leave the door. He thought maybe this was it, that now was when Gladio was going to tell him that this couldn’t happen again because it was just too risky. But Gladio surprised him by leaning down to kiss him. “I’ll see you later.”

He nodded as Gladio’s hand slipped from his wrist, and he had to fight his grin the whole time he walked back to his own quarters.


End file.
